The Crooked House by Christobel Kent Page A

eyes met, something about the movement must have roused the child because there was a wail and the woman straightened, the woman she knew. Her heart pounding, Alison fumbled for the ignition, turned to reverse, pulled away.
    Gina. Her friend Gina. Gina had a kid, Gina still here, disconsolate on a bar stool, big handsome fearless angry Gina. Alison accelerated towards the edge of the village, before she could look round, before she could turn back and get out of the car and grab Gina and hold on to her, arms around her, Gina. Gina, it’s me.
    And suddenly she was on the edge of the village, at a junction with what they’d always known as the fast road, the road the buses rocked along on the way to and from the town, the supermarket, the school. A sign on her left, half buried in the hedge said
Dyke End
, and she turned to see a lane that led to trees. A car loomed in her rear-view mirror, a horn tooted. Panicked, Alison made as if to pull away but out of nowhere, across her path, came a truck loaded with turnips, swaying,scattering grass and dust in its wake. The car behind her pulled out and past, a man glowering sideways at her. Alison leaned her head on the steering wheel and sobbed.
    Gina had a kid. She must have still been a kid herself when she got pregnant. Gina was unhappy: that much Alison knew, from how she’d sat on the bar stool last night and how she’d glared through the car window, just now. Their eyes had met, and in that moment the years evaporated, Gina might have been jeering from her bedroom door as Esme hurried down the stairs. ‘We’re supposed to be friends, remember?’ Gina had shouted after her. ‘Remember? Well, don’t come to me when you start freaking out.’ Had they got it out of her, had the nice policewoman been so nice when she talked to Gina, asked her why Esme hadn’t stayed after all, for the sleepover? Had it been boys? Had you been drinking?
What about drugs, you girls into drugs?
    Gina wouldn’t have cracked: Gina wouldn’t have said a thing to the police, not a thing.
    Gina.
It’s me.

Chapter Twelve
    Alisonsat in the car opposite the police station watching a man on the far kerb smoking. She saw him look up and down the street before going inside, head down, hands in his pockets. She could hardly go in and say,
She had a fringe, she had a big nose
: thirteen years on, who knew what she’d look like.
    By the time they’d come for her down the track, in their emergency vehicles, Esme had no longer been able to move or speak, she had sealed herself over. Because if she didn’t the thing behind her in the house, the black horror in that house that lay over the bodies and fed, would gather and swell and come shrieking out through the door, the windows, the cracks. It would batten on her and she would be gone, the police would find only buttons and bones.
    Sitting in the car now, looking at a head moving in one of the windows on the police station’s second floor but only seeing the grey line of that dawn horizon, Alison knew it was still there. It was out on the marsh, and it was waiting for her. She leaned down and rested her head on the steering wheel.
    It had been the woman who’d talked at her through thesucceeding days who’d saved her, even if she had only been doing her job. The policewoman, turning to shush the younger male officer, lowering her voice when it needed to be lowered, carrying on talking, asking, not letting it go. Alison needed her name.
    Hold on. She thought of Aunt Polly’s little cottage in Cornwall, and of official letters on the small table in her dark hall. Telephone calls, Polly’s hand over the mouthpiece waiting for Alison to run upstairs to her room and out of earshot. Alison got out her mobile, scrolled with her thumb through the names. She dialled.
    ‘Hello?’ The voice was rusty. Old.
    ‘Polly?’ There was a silence. ‘It’s me, Aunt Polly.’
    ‘Alison.’ She cleared her throat. ‘How lovely. To hear your voice.’ Heartbroken